Posts Tagged ‘Battery’

If you have a UPS, it’s probably worth paying attention to the temperature reading if it reports such a thing. My APC Smart-UPS 1000VA suffered a failed battery which wasn’t totally unexpected given I had last replaced it about two years ago.

While I was awaiting the replacement RBC6 battery, I had a poke about with apcupsd and noticed that it reckoned the internal temperature of the UPS was around 39-40 ℃ which seemed a bit high.

New battery arrived so I pulled the front panel off the UPS and tried to use that stupid plastic flap APC put on the battery to help you pull it out, surprise, it tore off like it’s done on every damn battery. Okay, so I’d have to reach in and get my hand behind the battery to push it out, which due to the nature of what a UPS generally does felt like that bit in the Flash Gordon movie when Peter Duncan sticks his arm in the tree stump and gets fatally stung. Nope, still not coming out and I could feel the battery was quite hot so I pulled the power and left it to cool down for an hour or two. With a bit of help from gravity it became apparent why the battery was being so stubborn:

The photo probably doesn’t illustrate just how distorted each side of the battery was. According to apcupsd the temperature is now around 25 ℃ with the new battery so it’s probably worth sticking some monitoring on that. Grabbing the temperature is easy if apcupsd(8) is running:

# /usr/sbin/apcaccess | grep -i temp
ITEMP : 25.9 C Internal

# /usr/sbin/apcaccess | grep -i temp
ITEMP : 25.9 C Internal

It should be easy enough to wrap that in a simple Nagios test and/or graph it with Cacti.